1st National King Holiday Starts With Week Of Activities

January 13, 1986|By United Press International.

WASHINGTON — Americans began saluting the memory of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. on Sunday, kicking off a week of activities that will culminate with the first national holiday Jan. 20 to mark his birthday.

Concerts, parades and other functions are planned to commemorate King`s life and ideals.

``Martin Luther King not only gave expression to the aspiration of blacks but appealed to the moral forces latent within the white community,`` said civil rights lawyer Joseph Rauh. ``His voice taught black people to hope and white people to care.``

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was with King on his last birthday-- Jan. 15, 1968--said, ``Our struggle today is to protect the integrity of King`s legacy.``

Jackson plans to hand out groceries to the poor on Wednesday and lead a demonstration at the Justice Department to protest the administration`s civil rights policies.

Many prominent Americans will join in celebrating the King holiday with activities by the Martin Luther King Center for Non-Violent Social Change in Atlanta and by a special holiday commission.

President Reagan will visit the Martin Luther King Elementary School in Washington and deliver an address.

The holiday, celebrated for the first time this year, culminates a 15-year legislative battle that began four days after King was shot April 4, 1968, as he stood on the second-floor balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

In 1983, Congress finally voted to declare Jan. 20 a holiday commemorating King`s birthday and President Reagan signed the bill making the third Monday in January the nation`s 10th legal holiday.

The federal government`s 2.8 million workers will have the day off at a cost of $18 million.

Forty-four states have enacted a state holiday, although 11 states will celebrate King`s birthday on Jan. 15. Some states, however, have designated the day to mark King`s birthday but are not officially observing it.

While civil rights leaders say the King holiday is an important symbol for all Americans, they say black Americans still lag behind whites in education, health, political clout and jobs more than 20 years after King`s crusade brought those issues to the forefront of American public discussion.

On Thursday, members of Congress and other dignitaries will attend a special ceremony at the Capitol where a bust of King will be unveiled.

In Atlanta, where King`s widow, Coretta Scott King, lives, a week of special activities is planned ,including an address by South Africa`s Bishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize.

On Jan. 20, a parade in Atlanta will be led by Rosa Parks, the Montgomery, Ala., seamstress who refused in 1955 to give up her bus seat for a white passenger. Her action sparked the modern civil rights movement.

King, then an unknown preacher, joined her protest, which began a nonviolent boycott of Montgomery`s buses.